I recently needed to set up some client side unit tests for our iOS receipt verification server. This server takes a payment object and verifies it with Apple to check if it’s actually a legal receipt and if it is, the content is awarded to the player. Server side, this is pretty simple, but it’s an important server step and should anything happen its possible for people to be locked out from getting their content.

So it’s important we have tests that send legal, invalid and corrupt data to the server and we need to test through the client API otherwise it’s not a test that can be 100% reliable.

It takes an SKPaymentTransaction because thats the object the client deals with. We’re going to use internal data such as NSStrings or NSData, but it shouldn’t be the clients responsibility to query the SKPaymentTransaction to get the relevant information. Should the structure change, our API also breaks and that’s not acceptable.

So we’re stuck with the SKPaymentTransaction and its API looks something like this

Now in our case, we’re interested in using [SKPaymentTransaction transactionIdentifier] and [SKPaymentTransaction transactionReceipt], which both need to be managed inside our verification call so we’ll need SKPaymentTransaction objects that return different values depending on what we’re testing.

And since they’re readonly, we can’t just set them manually.

Initially, I tried to use class extensions, just to add the behaviour I was looking for, as you’ll often add internal extensions to present readonly properties externally but support readwrite properties internally.

Compiles fine but at runtime it generates an unknown selector error. This is because the read only property has already be synthesised, and while the compiler now thinks it can see a setter, at runtime it’s not present.

So, my second attempt was to derive from SKPaymentTransaction and add the functionality there, passing through the base SKPaymentTransaction but using the derived type to set the value.

Fortunately, the compilers a bit smarter this time and warns me before I even start

error: auto property synthesis will not synthesize property 'transactionIdentifier' because it is 'readwrite' but it will be synthesized 'readonly' via another property [-Werror,-Wobjc-property-synthesis]

At this point I was a bit stuck until @pmjordan suggested I swizzled the transaction identifier and receipts to return the values I’m interested in testing, rather than setting the values directly.

But what needs to be swizzled when we’re attempting to override an Obj-C property defined as follows

As a result of this call, when the library calls [SKPaymentTransaction transactionReceipt] it will instead call replaced_getTransactionReceipt_Invalid which gives us the ability to pass through any receipt we want, including real, invalid and corrupt ones as our tests dictate.

It’s worth noting here that I’m using method_setImplementation rather than the usual method_exchangeImplementations which I’ll explain in a following post soon.